the_mysterious_mr_enterfandomcom-20200214-history
Rocket Power Review/Transcript
Sam: '''They got sand in the potato salad! They got sand in the potato salad! '''Magician: '''That's the spirit! '''Girl: '''Hey! I swallowed my gum! '''Magician: That's the spirit! What can you say about a show that gives...so little to offer? I've said that KaBlam! ''was probably the most "nineties" of the Nicktoons. I could still say that in the positive sense of the word. Meanwhile, the same thing could be said about ''Rocket Power,'' but in the negative sense of the word. This is a time capsule of outdated slang and trends that are completely alien to a modern audience. And I know what you're thinking. A lot of people brought this up when I first made my original ''Rocket Power ''episode review: "Didn't this show first air in 1999 and had most of its run in the early 2000s?" Yes, yes it did. But here's something that a lot of people don't know, it's-it's a little bit of a known fact: the nineties...didn't end until 2004. And for the record, the nineties as a decade started around 1987 and not 1990. You guys do realize that trends and fads don't magically start or end '''right' when a decade does, right? It's actually rare and bizarre when that happens like at the start of the 2010s. I say nineties with this show because the trends within it are much more in line with the nineties, and it's a lot easier than saying the "late nineties" and the "early 2000s" over and over again instead of just "the nineties." But around the late nineties and early 2000s, extreme sports were a huge thing. A lot of it was because of Tony Hawk really hitting the mainstream. He had achieved the first 900 in '99, the exact same year that this show came out, and his series of video games were '''really '''popular. Even ''I ''played them at the time, even though I don't care about sports and I've spent like, maybe a grand total of an hour on a skateboard. And that might be a problem with me reviewing this show. The concept of ''Rocket Power ''is that Tony Hawk is popular and Nickelodeon wants to cash in on the trends that he helped to make mainstream. I refuse to budge on this. Rocket Power'''s one of the most soulless shows that I've ever seen. It's nothing but trends of the time, and I'm having a hard time saying anything about it really. I mean we could talk about the characters, you know, what's actually there. There's Otto. Otto is an in-your-face asshole and a little shit who has nothing redeemable about him, and every single episode he was an asshole who can't stand losing to the point, where he's tempted to cheat. Repeatedly. Sure, he learns his lesson ''occasionally, but at the start of the next episode, he's back to square one. Twister, his best friend, is stupid. This is largely his entire character. He faces a flaw that a lot of stupid characters face. The writers behind this show thought that making him more ''stupid would give him ''more ''of a personality, but that's...not how this works. At all. Twister not being able to count to five is not a personality. It's not interesting or endearing or unique or funny. Come on, we're at 1999 now. We've seen stupid characters since ''literally ''the beginning, you can do better than that. Not helping the fact is that Otto himself is...stupid as well. So Twister's one character trait, is something that he almost doesn't even really have to himself. I guess Twister likes making videos to the point where he tapes a video camera to his helmet. I guess it's pretty interesting that this show predicted the GoPro over a decade before it actually existed. It's 'something, I suppose. Sam is the nerd kid who is completely uncoordinated. Let me tell you how this friendship would work in real life. It wouldn't. The skater kids would want nothing to do with him, and the feeling would be mutual. The nerd kid would want to spend time with other nerd kids. Sam spending time with the rest of the group is just too unrealistic and forced. I get that animation has a lot of weird or even bad friendships. I've even invented the term "the Craig" for it, where the friend offers nothing but a parasitic relationship. These are the characters like Jake Spidermonkey, or even Patrick Star, or Heffer...But here, it's not so much that the Rockets and Twister are...assholes to Sam, it's just that they have ''nothing in common whatsoever. Their hobbies are largely different, and whenever they're doing sports, it feels like Sam would rather be doing literally anything else. I don't think that these kids would ''dislike ''each other, I feel like that they would just ignore each other. And then there's Reggie. The girl. Her character is that she would be pissed that I mentioned her last. She would assume that I did it '''because '''she's a girl, because that is all you can say about her character; she's a girl. And every single one of her plots is about ''being a girl, or being overlooked next to the boys, and that's just about as nineties as you can get. Trying to be super progressive with a female character and having absolutely no clue what the fuck you're doing. I would say this show is kind of hypocritical by not taking Reggie's personality seriously, because, beyond "girl character" she has...no character, but as we've established, they don't take ''any'' of these character's personalities seriously. And you know, I talk about how "nineties" and "extreme" this show is like it's a problem. It's not really...if you could create some decent characters, then a show about just about anything could be interesting. But it's clear that not a lot of effort went into this show. Actually that's not entirely correct. A lot of effort went into this show...into the wrong things. They've clearly done a research on a bunch of sports and sports' tricks, and they really do understand the technicals ''of sports, more so than ''The Wild Thornberrys ''understood animals, unfortunately. There's definitely effort to show how..."cool" all of these sports are. Complete with some of the most "nineties" edits that you'll ever see! And remember kids, Otto Rocket is cool! He always wears his helmet and his knee pads! No, in real life, Otto Rocket is the type of kid who is going to beef it big time and split his head in half, because he thought that helmets were for "shoobies." Speaking of shoobies, the slang in this show does gets obnoxious. It's nowhere near as bad as ''Da Boom Crew, but that can be a problem in and of itself. Da Boom Crew's slang was ''so bad that it felt like you were listening to a foreign language. You can '''just '''figure out what the characters are saying in this show, so you feel constantly annoyed and you constantly cringe. Speaking of feeling constantly annoyed, the editing of this show is obnoxious. There's a bunch of cutaways to emphasize a piece of dialogue, or repeat cuts to show how badly a character failed to "Tony Hawk it up." It really does feel like adults trying to be cool with the youth, like a bicycle safety VHS tape or something. And that's what the show feels like in general. It's adults who are trying to be hip with the kids. Compare it to ''KaBlam!, that really understood what kids were into at the time. But beyond that, actually put some effort into the show beyond just the style. On another level, ''Rocket Power ''is all "style over substance." There's nothing in this show that you couldn't get from somewhere else besides the "in-your-face nineties attitude and editing." I mean the episode I reviewed "Snow Day," it's a hooky episode. Tons of cartoons do that. It was ''literally '''a ''Hey Arnold! ''episode with the same results. Then we have Reggie trying to prove that girls can do the sports thing. Oh no, Otto, you need to learn that cheating is wrong! Oh no, Sam is abusing his position of power as a safety monitor! What's gonna happen, I have no idea, it's not like I've ever seen this plot before! I could go on and on about this, it's every single episode. Well, it's either that or the kids competing in some typical sporting event. And you know, we've had a million kids' movies about just about every single sport in existence at this point. ''The Sandlot ''was made in '93, and skateboarding existed since 1955, when Marty McFly invented rock and roll. This shit ain't new! Even less so in 2019. I guess there's always going to be a first time that somebody's going to be introduced to a cliche, so this stuff wouldn't be all that bad. Maybe that's why this show lasted for like, four seasons. I mean sometimes cashing out on a trend really does work and it'll give you some popularity at the time, but in hindsight it looks nothing more like an...embarrassing photo of outdated fashions that make you look like a clown. You almost didn't notice that this is probably Klasky Csupo's best job in terms of actual animation and character designs. Shame, really, but...shoobies ruin everything. '''Announcer: '''Next up- ''(Shows clip of the Spongebob episode "Spongebob Meets the Strangler") 'Spongebob and Tattletale Strangler: '*laughing maniacally* (End Credits Theme: Rocket Power Theme, which is cut off after the first second) Category:Nick-o-Rama Category:Transcripts